…plus c’est la même chose.” So goes the old French expression that translates to “the more things change, the more it’s the same thing.” But with last Friday’s relaunch of the GlobalGiving website, we’re hoping that the more things change, the BETTER they will be for the GlobalGiving community!

In the old days, we did alot based on “gut.” What we thought donors would like, or would make it easier to give, or even just what colors we preferred. Sometimes we hit on something that worked, but just as often we struggled to figure out why people weren’t responding as we anticipated.

But over the past few years, we started to focus a lot more on asking our donors and community members what they thought. We started watching the way that users interacted with GlobalGiving, and listening closely to what you had to say – through the surveys you fill out on our website, in small focus groups, and through hands-on user testing. And while people generally felt that our site was easy to navigate, there were many areas for improvement. For example, testing showed that users had trouble finding all of the information they were looking for…and that they preferred bigger pictures on project pages.

To address these findings, we created a new site layout and navigation. We even expanded the physical size of the site on the screen to display more content since we saw many users were now using larger monitors.

Have we gotten it right? Early feedback and data suggests we’re moving in the right direction, but we’ll be doing a lot more testing to keep honing how the site looks, feels, and works for you – the goal being to make it easy, fun, and informative to give to projects on GlobalGiving.

When we look back now at how the site looked a few years ago, it’s almost like looking at an old high school yearbook…did GlobalGiving really look like that?!?!?!